Human communication in 2015
TL;DR: For marketing purposes, best way to succeed with communication is to pick a Nemesis (keep it anonymous, let the reader give name for the Nemesis) and provide a salvation (an actionable solution to the pain Nemesis causes in your every day life). The status of this article is first-draft; it might contain some original ideas that have not gone through refinement process of getting feedback from the intended audience (you). Give me feedback to help me improve the reading experience for the next reader (14.4.2015). Effective communication is a very important trait to possess for any start-up (or human being), especially during the era of social media. However, the way we communicate today has far passed the requirements of the past; our teachers dealt with daily short newspaper articles, we have Twitter (and the feed is filtered by recommendation algorithms). Everyone of us has become the author of our own lives with wider readership than ever before. The means of communication are practically free, quality messages are not, and never will be. Because of the easiness to publish and get some kind of reaction, many of us have the misconception that we are good at communication. Most of you are not. Neither am I, even after writing +200,000 words of fiction a year, working with Internet for most of my life and being obsessed about perfect human communication for ages. What is a Nemesis? Nemesis is the status-quo you want to change (competitor, policy, business process etc.). Nemesis is your anti-thesis; all good stories and communication can be built upon the idea of the author and reader having the same enemy and/or fears (the reader just might not be aware of that, yet). You can't reach a reader that doesn't feel your pain. Satisfaction doesn't push people to spend time for learning new things. Focus on readers who are in pain and provide them guidance (your solution). Bad communication is based on emotions and worse communication uses superlative adjectives, which are always empty no matter how you use them. Real communication provides experiences for reflection. This is why Nemesis is important, Nemesis is real and it can be experienced. Emotions and superlatives belong to diaries, not into the world of inter-human communication. Experience is the super-set of emotions, if readers share your experiences, their response will be emotional. Never mention the name of the Nemesis, unless it is done with a subtle and harmless way and everyone knows your Nemesis and the criticism is not perceived as offending (Google, Facebook, Amazon, Netflix). If you start a war, less people will follow you. Instead, try to write a useful message for people who relate to your pain and will build the story that you are actually talking about their Nemesis within their own minds and start leading them. What is an actionable solution? "Read the book! No I won't. Read the article! Maybe later. Do anything at all! I have better things to do." -People who try to teach This is who we are, we are beings driven by our own motivations, we are not sheep. Sheepness is a group behavior programmed by quality communication that uses experiences to establish movements (during the World Wars this branch of science was called propaganda). What is an actionable solution for an individual depends on ones commitment towards the movement. I earlier wrote about Viral Persuation Pricing, which has a relation to increasing the perceived commitment to a message. Commitment depends upon the messenger and the required action. The art of persuation is to build addiction for learning more (about the Nemesis and the salvation). In traditional 1950's world, we might had written a book and our prefered actionable solution would be that someone would buy the book (or do something after the book has been read). With a bookstore user interface the steps are following: # You read the side-cover of the book, the title and/or the name of the author rings your subconcscious bells. # You pick up the book and see the front-cover, which you find interesting and then you... # Check the back-cover and start to read it (notice there was three actions you did before reading anything worth knowing about the book) # If you found the back-cover interesting, you might skim through some pages and buy the book. # Even though you read the book, you still might not get it in the way the author intended. Or if it is written with bad communication (or wrong Nemesis), you might just drop it and never pick it up again ("close tab"). What is an actionable solution at the Internet? In the Internet an action is a click. The worst kind of click is "close tab", the second worst kind of click is "no click for your actionable solution, but instead for something else", which usually leads to the first worst kind of click later. Internet is a very fine tuned beast if you understand how it really works. You need to build well working and addicting learn-more-funnels. Some writers use The Snowflake Method to write novels; how it works is that you start from the least amount of words possible. This is very useful for the Internet also: # Write a short message(s) that you can post to Twitter and chat rooms (less than 200 characters) # Write a Facebook status update(s) or event(s) (less than 250 words) # You may use any other social media, e.g. a question / answer to Quora or write longer social media posts e.g. pinned Facebook-page content (less than 1000 words) # The full story of your product should be within your home page (Wiki or a blog is also a good idea; navigation and editability of home pages are poor for a full story that evolves as time goes by) # All your content has to make your reader want to learn more about you and to feel your solutions for the pain points you portray The actions are following: # With less than 200 characters you should get followers and some clicks to the link you provide # With less than 250 words you should be able to get Social Media Reputation (likes, follows etc.) and some clicks to your provided link and the link can be directly to your sales funnel # With less than 1000 words you should be able to get subsribers to your content, email addresses, shares and other virality; if you need more than 1000 words for good sales funnel link follow-through conversion, you have the wrong Nemesis and people can't relate to your messages # Within your Home Page, Wiki or Blog, you should be able to create addiciton to learn; more clicks to your content until the actionable solution has been tried. # You need a proper follow up process so that people won't forget about you. To keep your marketing costs low and spend as little as possible for communicaitons you don't need transactions, you need subscribers. I have tried some more advanced ideas with this Wiki, which you can perhaps figure out by browsing the contents and my action proposals. I will write more specific guidelines later related to this exact topic. The idea is that you get people deep within the network of your influence, for which social media is a very effective tool today. The status of this article is first-draft; if you find these ideas useful, give me feedback and help me improve the reading experience for the next reader.